Observy McObservface Episode 11: Getting S.M.A.R.T.–Brains, Burn-in, and Bending Toward Cloud with Anne Dalton

In this episode, Anne Dalton, Transformation Specialist at Red Hat’s NAPS Division, talks about parallels that can be drawn between neuroscience and software, teaching government agencies and other clients “The Cloud” and helping them to navigate how to go about implementing it successfully by using S.M.A.R.T. goals, all while relaying why observability and transparency are crucial.

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Jonan Scheffler: Hello and welcome back to Observy McObservface, the observability podcast that we let the internet name and got exactly what we deserve. My name is Jonan. I'm on the developer relations team here at New Relic, and I will be back every week with a new guest and the latest in observability news and trends. If you have an idea for a topic you'd like to hear me cover on this show, or perhaps a guest you would like to hear from, maybe you would like to appear as a guest yourself, please reach out. My email address is jonan@newrelic.com. You can also find me on Twitter as @thejonanshow. We are here to give the people what they want. This is the people's observability podcast. Thank you so much for joining us. Enjoy the show.

I am joined today by my guest, Anne Dalton. Anne, how are you holding up?

Anne Dalton: Hey Jonan, I'm doing all right on this end! How about yourself?

Jonan: I am not, but more than I was. I'm doing better than I was, but life is busy. I think this work-from-home thing is different for me now. I've been working from home for a long time and now, in the absence of even the option to go to an office or a conference, it's become a bit much. I need to find ways to make space for myself to breathe, to be perfectly honest. But in answer to your actual question, which I think is just the social nicety that we all do in America is, “I'm good, thanks.”

Anne: [laugh] I much prefer the real answer.

Jonan: Me, too.

Anne: No, I hear you.

Jonan: Yeah.

Anne: The whole work-from-home thing, especially now it's conference season. Here we are in fall leading up to the holidays and we're normally rushing off on airplanes, getting to meet new people, talking on big stages and the whole world is still virtual.

Jonan: Yeah and may be virtual for a while now, but I guess we'll find out soon. So why don't you tell us about yourself? Who is Anne Dalton, really?

Anne: Well, the professional answer I suppose I can give is, I am a transformation specialist here at Red Hat. So what I do is I try to help big technology enterprises. Right now, specifically, I'm focused on the government. So I try to help the government figure out a way to modernize their practices so that they can be more efficient and get the functionality in the products that they're trying to develop out to their users faster and more reliably.

Jonan: That was a very professional answer. I like that. I wonder—you know, this is the kind of casual question I just ask a lot of people—if you've ever studied neuroscience or anything?

Anne: [laugh] It's like we've met before.

Jonan: Yeah.

Anne: Yeah, I have. Yeah, I came into this whole technology world in this very roundabout way. So I studied in college—they always tell you, you can be anything that you want to be and for some people, that's true, and for some people, that's a load of crap, but I believed it for a second. I went to college and I came from this tiny town and all of a sudden, the world got so much bigger. So I studied everything I could get my hands on and I wound up graduating with a bachelor's in neuroscience. I've also got a couple of minors in chemistry and Spanish, but I've studied about six languages total. So, you know, you put that all together, and all of a sudden you wind up in development.

Jonan: Yes, of course. The software world is a real natural progression from that. I think it's very interesting. I was talking to someone about this the other day, the structure of humanity, the structure of brains, I think, is largely responsible for the way that humans interact with each other and the structure of those social systems we build as a result of our brains, and then those social systems forming societies.

I actually think that from a systems thinking perspective, there are a lot of parallels that can be drawn between neuroscience and software. Specifically, when I think of the brain and what I know of modern neuroscience—which believe me, is quite little—I know that “If neurons fire together, they wire together” is the thing I hear neuroscientists say a lot. In a systems perspective, I think that I can find some examples of that, but I want to give you a shot. Tell me some examples of where you think that appears in the work that we do now.

Anne: Yeah. I'll pull it out of the computer for a second and I'll make it about people, because at the end of the day, technology is still about people. It's only as good as the people who build it and it's also only as good as the way we use it and how it actually helps us progress.

And one of the interesting patterns that I noticed is the way that there's always this hierarchy and it's the way people work together from the idea of a product to the implementation and delivery of the product. There's so many different people and teams and processes and procedures and security and compliance, and a lot of times what we notice is, and to be literal about that—firing together, wiring together—there's this silo that happens in between them, and this is the DevOps problem that we've been trying to solve for years now.

But the interesting thing about that is if we get—and we do have good examples of it, and Netflix is a great example of it—if we can get teams working together and we can start showcasing and observe how that works, then what happens on trend is once one team gets that advantage or gets that success, because they've unlocked that ability to break down those silos to work together and getting in that efficiency, that real true advantage, then other teams start noticing like, “Oh, this worked.” And we talk about the SRE model from Google or the Netflix example, like both of those are just examples of, we can read about that other experience and we can try to take away from it and it's a learned behavior.

And when you start changing the way you work and transforming your enterprise, it feels really unnatural. But the more you do it, the better you get at it, the more natural it becomes and two interesting things happen. One is, more people, more companies, more teams start doing that and the second thing is, you actually do become more flexible—I mean adaptable when I say flexible—and maybe that's a better way to say it. You're more open to new ideas, you're more willing to try something new, and failure is less of this terrifying word where, “Oh my gosh, this can't maintain a production and people will never be able to use it, and it's more of an, ‘Oh cool, let's test this scientific hypothesis. That didn't work, what's next?’”

Jonan: Yeah. This makes a lot of sense to me. I think about this kind of process burden. When an organization grows, status quo is a real thing and a driving factor in the way we work, very often, and it's hard for us to remember in the moment that, “This is the way it has always been done,” is not a reason to continue to do a thing.

You talk about this idea of flexibility, adaptability, coming into an organization as you start to break the pieces loose. You give the example of Netflix, what immediately pops into my mind are products like Gremlin and this whole Chaos Engineering—a world that evolved from Netflix where we are trying to break systems intentionally to kind of loosen things up. We're kind of putting cracks in the mud to see what comes, and I think that the flexibility and adaptability being the new process, that's how you really make an organization, the size of a large enterprise or a government agency, change. You've got to introduce almost a viral element of change.

This failure-is-learning concept that you were talking about, I think it’s really relevant to observability, getting to a place where we are comfortable with the idea that we are in an ongoing series of experiments to improve, and in order to keep ourselves from hitting a local maxima, we have to keep iterating and be comfortable with that failure.

So from that perspective, I know it's difficult given the nature of your work, to share stories. But maybe you could share a fake story that parallels a thing you have seen in the government that might give some examples of a large organization like that learning to fail and feeling that pain.

Anne: Yeah. I think feeling that pain is a big touch point. When somebody like Red Hat comes in and tells a government customer or a large enterprise that, “Hey, you can't get where you want to go because of the way you're doing things now. But if you can change these couple of things, if you can introduce this different type of culture, bring a little bit of a flipped personality in here, then you can actually talk about the technology that we can bring in that will help you be more successful.” And the very first thing that always seems to happen is immediately they get defensive, “But what do you mean? Our culture is great. We do just fine here. Don't attack me there.”

What I find so funny is there's an enterprise culture and there's a team culture and then within those, every person has a different personality and it's all kind of the same thing and it bubbles up and down. It goes both ways. So one example that I can give, we have a pretty large customer that we've been working with and they came to us and they said—this is maybe five or six years ago at this point—“OK, so we have this mandate and we have to go to the cloud,” and they listed off all of these things and of course, we're sitting there and we're trying to listen, trying to figure out what problem they're really trying to solve by going to “the cloud.”

Jonan: Yeah.

Anne: Well, we learned two things. We learned that they don't know what the cloud is and they didn't know why they were being told they needed to use it.

Jonan: Right.

Anne: So here we are talking about culture and personality and work styles and DevOps and they're like, “What's a cloud?”

Jonan: Yeah. Right. And you have to educate them that one, they don't know, and two, you can tell them and explain to them why, but that motivation has to come first.

Anne: Exactly, and that's really the key that you've got to unlock. You know, we can't talk about some of these lower-level functions. And one of the examples that we used with this customer—and this was kind of internal as we prepped to go—”How can we educate them, and how can we do it while still being humble and not making them feel like they really don't understand?” So we look at it a lot like bringing the psychology concept back, like Maslow's hierarchy.

Jonan: Right.

Anne: “OK, where are you on this triangle of needs so that we can get you to where you only have to worry about the top two levels?” And it turns out that the fundamental concepts were missing, so OK, cool. We can educate you on what those are, and then we can work with you to build a goal statement that's—we talk about S.M.A.R.T. goals here. So what is Specific, Measurable—forgetting all of them now—Achievable.

Jonan: This is a good test.

Anne: Whatever. This is a great test and you know, had you asked me two days ago, I could've told you, because I sat in a training and we just talked about these S.M.A.R.T. goals.

Jonan: Let's see, before you walked into the training, you had your notes that you were looking at it. See, it's always hard on the spot, especially on a podcast cover like what does that acronym even mean? You know, it's S.M.A.R.T.

Anne: The goal of a S.M.A.R.T. goal is to get something that is Achievable, it's Measurable and it's Time-boxed. So we talked about metrics, we talked about being observable. So once we educate them on some of those concepts, then we can do some workshops to educate them on some of the fundamental technologies they're going to have to use in order to build up and then we can bring in culture and those kinds of things.

So we've been with this customer for going on our third year now, actually on-site with this customer.

Jonan: Wow.

Anne: It took us a couple of years to shop the ideas, build up the concepts, help them understand where we fit in and how we help them, but it's been really great. And not that this is a perfect metric of success—because marketing can be really hit or miss here—but they started getting so much interest from other groups and teams in that organization coming to them saying, “Hey, we noticed that what you're doing is really different. Can you tell us more about it?” And they actually got so much interest, they started a monthly transformation newsletter that they just pass out across their whole entire org, kind of answering questions, saying, “Here's the latest, here's what we're doing.”

And you know, transformation is not easy, and changing a culture, especially somewhere that big, takes a long time, but they've come miles from where they started. They know what the cloud is, why they’re there. They know why they're there now. It's been really fun to watch them kind of grow up.

Jonan: Yeah. This is a really interesting perspective, I think, for a lot of us. So many people in the circles where I operate do two of these conference scenes and a lot of people in the startup community, they're small engagements. People often recommend to each other, hang out at the company for a couple of years, but then try the next thing, learn the next step. And when you are working with a company that is engaging a single project for multiple years and watching that change happen, it's both gratifying and tremendously informative. There's something to be said for duration. It does matter, especially with systems work and watching these come along.

So when you're in these organizations and you're installing observability in a government agency—I'm trying to picture an example. If I'm walking into the NSA—I'm sure this is the NSA that you're talking about secretly—and I'm trying to get the NSA to get some additional observability. Because if there's one thing I know about the NSA, it's that they're lacking insight into computers. They know very little about the internal workings of computers. So you show up and you have to pitch them on observability. What do you say? What is your first meeting, where the topic is observability and you’ve got to teach them what that even means?

Anne: One of the things I try to do early on is relate observability and transparency. So if we can be more transparent about—you know, obviously, let's take need-to-know into account here. We're not saying that everything that you do needs to be transparent or observed or communicated very clearly. What we're saying is that if you can make the things that need to be transparent, transparent, then other teams can have a better understanding of how to help you, or how to use your product, or what the intent is on the road map. That's super helpful. And a lot of times, people don't really know where to start or what that really means and we talk about it—bringing academia into it a little bit—in terms of metrics sometimes. What's something that's tangible, that's observable, that is transparent?

And “Accelerate” is a great book for this. It's always something that I recommend to my customers. I come with a booklist prepared generally—I don't have 572 hours to talk to you, but these guys wrote a book and they basically say that there's four metrics where for me and most of my customers, it's kind of the bare minimum. But those are deployment frequency, lead time for change, meantime to resolution, and change failure rate. Basically, what that gives you an idea of is whether your team is high-performing, medium-performing, or if it's low-performing. It’s not necessarily that your developers aren't quality developers, it could be any reason causing failure or causing low performance in any of those areas.

But that's a great way to just have some high-level visibility into what's going on. You're not having to go into the Jira board and read a story—if you're in leadership. You have a board that shows trends over time and you can see the improvement of these teams, you can see how it spreads across your enterprise, and it also helps inform you about what other metrics might be good to measure. So that generally opens them up to this conversation, especially in a world where observability and transparency is just, you might as well say a four-letter word in a lot of these agencies. So what you're trying to do is crack the door.

Jonan: You make an excellent point that selling the NSA on the idea that not everything needs to be seen all the time could be hard, but then you walk into these government agencies and they have this privacy thing that they do. I mean, you think about what a company does with PII or people in our industry talk a lot about GDPR compliance, how difficult it is to have to manage.

Think about a government agency and how they're expected to handle data and how they're expected to handle interactions with their peers within the same organization. Even in the same department, you've got a team of 100 people and you're not allowed to talk to those people about this thing that's in the next set of cubies over from you. It's a very interesting culture to break and for all of our government listeners, again, we're not saying there's anything wrong with your culture. Your culture is great, but maybe we could level up a little bit.

So the next step in my line of questioning here is, “What is unique about government and large enterprise, as opposed to some of these smaller companies?” I'm imagining that you've had engagements on both sides of this line, there is that culture piece. But in terms of the way that people adopt the change, I guess—I would expect the government is slower, for example.

Anne: It can be. I find this very interesting. A couple of years ago, had we had this conversation, I’d have just said, “Oh my gosh, it's so much slower. We're still using Windows 98, I can't connect to the internet through anything but dial-up.” But you know, honestly, we've come a long way in the last five, 10 years and I'm starting to see a lot of our customers who are really actually on the bleeding edge. They're doing things that even commercial enterprises aren't doing yet and that's been really fun to watch this—and maybe I'm overusing this term here—but it's been fun to watch that government transformation as well. We're not thinking small; they're really quite literally shooting for Mars here.

Jonan: Yeah.

Anne: And making progress.

Jonan: Right. It's impressive. Is it the digital service, what do they call it? You know this. There's like a group of modern technologists who were maybe brought in under the Obama administration to make this kind of crack-force tech team that was going to level up the government. You know what I'm talking about?

Anne: I know what you're talking about and I'm trying to remember—it is Digital something.

Jonan: Yeah.

Anne: I'm trying to remember exactly what they call it.

Jonan: Have you worked with them?

Anne: I did for maybe like a couple of months back at a previous company. Digital Services. Something like that.

Jonan: That's exactly it. That’s why we're having a hard time. It's the US Digital Service, that's the whole name.

Anne: There we go! [laugh]

Jonan: Yeah.

Anne: Because it's so easy, it's right in your face.

Jonan: Yeah.

Anne: Yeah. I was working with a previous company and we overlapped very, very briefly—I was in mobile device security at the time. They were doing this really unique program and the best thing that I can think of to compare it, it was kind of like a study abroad program for this specific account that they were working. They had representatives and developers from Google and Microsoft and people out in the industry who were coming into government to do a tour, if you will.

Jonan: Oh, interesting. Like a tour of duty?

Anne: Yeah, exactly. So they were here for two years and then they had to go back to their parent company, whoever it was. And what's really cool about that, is it allows a lot of insight. So it makes—I imagine—Google or Microsoft or whoever those other bigger, more commercial organizations are, it informs them more of the government trends. What's going on in this side of the house? How can you make your products more government-friendly?

Jonan: Yeah. This is really smart.

Anne: You asked earlier what's different about government and there are a lot of things that are the same, there's a lot of things that are different, which made that experience that I had that I got to talk with some co-workers about who were from the digital services, really unique.

A lot of the things that are the same, there's always this compliance requirement or the security requirement and many times, it's that somebody formed the standard 10 years ago and even though the technology is nowhere near the same, we're still following that same process, and it takes forever to get something approved. There's various review boards in commercial and on the government side, we call that an Authority to Operate, or ATO. So it has to go through this series of rigorous, semi-rigorous, tests and get a check box before it can go live in production and be usable by the end user or the customer or whomever. In the government, we also have added security initiatives.

So it's kind of funny. A lot of the time, I think people assume that compliance and security are the same thing, and I am here to tell you, as somebody who lives on both sides of that, they are definitely not. [laughs] That's been a big challenge here in the government lately, is with all the modernization that we have and the new technology that we continue to get and as we race and become more informed and better at delivering on artificial intelligence and machine learning capabilities, we're not keeping up with the compliance requirements. There's still these outdated processes. So it can take a year to get an ATO and by the time you do that, the technology is out of date and we want to be on the next iteration, we want to be doing the next best thing.

Jonan: Wow.

Anne: So what we're trying to do right now is figure out, “How do you speed that up? How can we get the government and industry as well? How can we improve or adapt the compliance process for modern technology and modern developed practices?”

Jonan: Is it even so granular as to be a specific version? I'm getting Prometheus' X version approved and then a year later, my approval comes through and I am well behind, I’m maybe security updates in between?

Anne: Yeah, and that's why there's a lot of patching that happens. Usually, it's between every major version. So if you're on like a 3.x, you don't have to get a new ATO for 3.1, .2, .3, whatever, but you would probably have to go through some kind of review process or some kind of ATO update process at a minimum, to go from 3.11 to 4.0, for example.

Jonan: There's a board of people who determine this or does it go to another department somewhere in the government, like the ATO department?

Anne: Yeah. Effectively. So usually, it's called a compliance department, but sometimes it's QA. They go by different names; it kind of depends on who your agency is or your organization is at the time. But what we've noticed is, more often than not, that's one of the biggest silos we can get Dev and Ops to talk, but all of a sudden, there's this compliance team, or this testing team, or whatever they call themselves at that org. That's the big communication gap. That's the wall that we can't seem to transcend.

Jonan: When I go with a new SaaS product here at New Relic that I want to use and I just want it wired into the customer database, it's not a big deal. Then IT gets all up in my face about it. Sometimes they take 24 hours to get back to me. It's very frustrating. I cannot imagine a world operating on these kinds of timelines.

But at the same time, we were talking about the organizational movement and the cultural changes that happen, and that can still happen quite quickly because of this kind of viral process that you're talking about is really interesting.

Anne: Well, it's kind of cool to live in a world where technology is starting to force that change, you know, and we are lucky enough—and I say that with caution—but we are lucky enough that technology advances really quickly and sometimes, it can feel overwhelming and it can feel hard to keep up. But it also pushes us to be better, faster, think on our feet a little bit more, to be a little more reactive, and get out of our comfort zone sometimes. And that, in and of itself, can have a decent influence on culture and personality, because we're no longer sitting here using, to your point, the same SaaS version for two years. If we have the same SaaS version for three months, that's kind of surprising, sometimes. We are simultaneously trying to change for ourselves to push the technology; we're also being pushed by the technology.

Jonan: I am really impressed with some of the changes I've seen around the websites I have to interact with, with government agencies. In fact, I found the perfect example of this. I found one the other day that was a lost money thing. I don't know why I ended up on this website. Maybe someone shared it on social or something, but it was like, you lost funds—over the years, you had a deposit from some apartment or something.

I went across this site and they said, “Oh, what's your name?” and then they said, “OK, you got three of these. Click here and here and here and verify these bits of information that it just happened.” Didn't have to find streetlights for the new neural network that will ultimately destroy us all. Wasn't finding school buses for the AI that's going to come as the Terminator someday. It just went, it took me a couple of minutes, and then a check showed up in the mail. I was shocked. I mean, I was legitimately shocked that it was a process designed for the United States government.

Or another more recent experience: When COVID hit, I was out of work for a period, and I went and I got my unemployment thing. They had a problem with the software here in Oregon where you can't give someone a check for more than $999—there are not enough spaces for the digits. That's the kind of world we're working with in many cases, right?

Anne: Absolutely. Yeah, and this is a perfect government example right there. You have some people who are leaning on the edge and that check shows up tomorrow and it's got your information and it's where you go, and you've got some organizations who have a longer journey.

Jonan: Longer journey is right.

Well, this has been a fantastic journey. I really appreciate you joining me today. Oh, I want to ask this, actually. There are a lot of people in that area, especially in the DC area, where the majority of US software developers live. Not a lot of people realize that because we tend to be a pretty California-centric culture, but I think nearly 7% of the developers in the US are concentrated directly in the DC Metro area. Does that sound right?

Anne: Yeah, that sounds right. You know, there's a lot of talk about this coming up, actually. DC is really starting to change the scene. There are a lot of government consultants here, but more and more there's becoming this IT revolution that's happening in the DC area, and it's really becoming a major tech hub. I won't go so far as to say it's the next Silicon Valley, but I will say it's an interesting place and we're going to have a spotlight on us, if we don't already.

Jonan: That's fantastic news. I made the case the other day to someone that for developer events, we should present—I mean, given the option, if you have to choose a time zone—try to present in the Pacific Time Zone, so that you make the math a little easier for them. But given that the majority are in the DC area, maybe I need to change my policy.

So my original question was given that you're working in an interesting space that is clearly changing quickly, if someone is sitting out there in Arlington today—they just got out of high school, they want to come into your particular line of work—what advice would you have for that person coming into the industry, working with government agencies and large enterprises, doing this kind of consulting? What would you tell yourself at that stage?

Anne: That's a great question.

Jonan: Thank you. I'm very, very good at this. I do this a lot.

Anne: [laugh] You are. I can tell. Yes!

Jonan: And humble, extremely humble.

Anne: Oh, no need for that.

So I've actually been lucky enough to go to a couple of college campuses and a couple of events. I usually go to Grace Hopper every year, it's the largest women in tech conference. Unfortunately, this year it was all virtual, but I got a chance to talk to a lot of people who are struggling with that exact question, and there's two different people who typically ask that question.

One person is who I was when I was around the world going, ”What do I want to be when I grow up?” And then there's the exact opposite of me, who are the people saying, “I know exactly what I want to do. I want to do this. What's the next step? How do I gain the next award? Or how do I get better?” And I think that there's a perfect hybrid in there.

The advice that I have is: Always be curious. If there's something that you haven't tried that you think might be really fun, don't wait for somebody on YouTube and watch them do it. Go try to build it and fail, blow up your computer. I have three sitting in front of me, two of them don't work for that reason. But that's another learning opportunity for me to do either one of two things. Fix it myself and figure it out and learn something new, or make a new friend who can help me fix it. So always be curious.

Jonan: This is really good advice, in general. You reminded me when you began of a quote from Baz Luhrmann. Are you familiar with Baz Luhrmann and the “Sunscreen” song? He says, “The most interesting people I know didn't know at 22 what they wanted to do with their lives. Some of the most interesting 40-year-olds I know, still don't,” and I absolutely agree that life is a journey. We're all on this together.

Remember that in any moment, you are not expected to see what's ahead of you.  The whole point, and a large part of observability even existing, is that we can't know the future. We don't know what's coming. Just throw yourself out there. You don't have anything to lose except, breaking the family computer as I did when I was in high school by accidentally compressing the entire hard drive, but I did eventually get it fixed. It only took three days, a lot of floppy disks later.

Thank you so much for coming on the show, Anne. I really appreciate your time, and I look forward to having you back someday in the future. When that time comes, I want to be able to hold your prediction against you and either congratulate you on your fantastic success, or remind you that you said a thing that was wrong one time, and then we can all say, “Ha, ha” like that, exactly like that. What do you think the next year is going to bring for your space?

Anne: Well, there have been several memes coming around and I'll start with us because it's a little bit funny, but it also is real. So there's, ”What transformed your enterprise in 2020?” and the joke is, COVID.

Jonan: Oh.

Anne: Right? Because all of a sudden, we're all virtual so companies who weren't set up for that had to learn how to do it really fast. I think in the next year, unfortunately, it's going to look a lot like it looks now, and my prediction is that this is only going to get better as it becomes the new normal, as we accept our restlessness and embrace technology more. I think videoconferencing is going to get better, more reliable. I think like what you're doing on your show here, podcasts are going to become more of a primary source of information, and I think texting chats or just work chats—like Slack, like Google Chat, all of those—are going to see a significant increase in users.

And I embrace it if, should we get back to being able to travel and be more in-person towards the later part of next year. I definitely think that it's going to be more in the before times, less than we would have. I think we'll still do more face-to-face over virtual technology, but it's certainly going to be an interesting time.

Jonan: I agree with you. I think this is a really good opportunity for the world to realize, finally, how effective remote work can be. I think right now what we're doing, as a society, is brute-forcing the productivity in order to keep the bus rolling. We've got to work some long hours and sometimes get lost in our work and we'll find our balance again, but I'm excited for it and I am really excited to have you back next year when both Google and Slack have gone out of business and I can be like, “Ha, I told you so.” No, that's a very safe prediction. I think you're right.

It's been an absolute pleasure and thank you so much for coming on the show. Do you have any parting takes for our listeners before we sign off here?

Anne: You know, if transformation is something that you're interested in, go for it. My parting words are: Don't be afraid, don't let the overwhelming feeling take over. If your organization wants to adopt more modern processes or if you, as a human being, just want to figure out how to get on a better track for yourself. There's never a better time to start than now. We've got nothing better to do while we're sitting at home in COVID. So just jump in!

Jonan: Where can people find you online?

Anne: You can find me on Twitter at @AnneKDalton. You can also find me on LinkedIn.

Jonan: Excellent. All right, you have a wonderful day. I'll see you in a year.

Anne: Thanks, Jonan.

Jonan: Thank you so much for joining us for another episode of Observy McObservface. This podcast is available on Spotify and iTunes and wherever fine podcasts are sold. Please remember to subscribe so you don't miss an episode. To continue your journey with us, take a listen to our Observy Mcobservface episode 3 with Bobby Tables. If you have an idea for a topic or a guest you would like to hear on the show, please reach out to me. My email address is jonan@newrelic.com. You can also find me on Twitter as @thejonanshow. The show notes for today's episode along with many other lovely nerdy things are available on developer.newrelic.com. Stop by and check it out. Thank you so much. Have a great day.

For related New Relic integrations to use, see our Infrastructure monitoring platform.